Chicago’s Gtrot Makes Travel Social: Guest

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Gtrot wants to make your next trip the best of your life, and is building the tools to help make that a reality.

Travel can be notoriously difficult, as it involves experience and new situations that the person on the go might not understand or be prepared for. Everyone could use at least a little advice for their next trip. Gtrot’s goal is to make sure that anyone can get the help they need, and from sources they can trust.

If you were going to Rome, who would you ask first for tips, the Internet, or your friend who went to Italy six months ago? Your friend, of course, because they know you, and you know them and therefore any advice they give can be tailored to you, and you know their biases which you can use to distill their notes. In other words, friends are a powerful and simple way to get effective travel help.

Gtrot’s technology links you to your friends, and shows you where they have gone, and what advice they give. It essentially provides a guidebook of what your friends know that you can use whenever you travel. It’s any person with wanderlust’s new best friend, provided their friends have ever left their home state.

The service has other perks as well, such as alerting you when you are going to be in the same city as someone that you know, and telling you when a friend has plans to come to your town.

Gtrot is as Chicago as can be, not only calling the city home, but also having raised their latest round of finance from powerhouse Lightbank.

The company is hoping to grow to 50,000 users by the end of the year, and hopes to grow that tenfold in 2012.

Alex is a writer and technologist who covers emerging companies in the Midwest. He has worked previously for numerous early stage technology companies, contributes to The Next Web, and has a particular interest in watching the social web monetize.